Artists at Work: Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

Gemma Sharpe

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's artistic practice is based on
collaboration and dialogue. Their approach includes film-making,
drawing, installation, photography, and performance, as well as
publishing and curating. Since 2004 they have run the artist
platform and screening space no.w.here, in London. This
interview focuses on Mirza and Butler's most recent film The
Exception and the Rule (2009), which forms a part of their
current project, 'The Museum of Non Participation' (2008-ongoing).
The project was developed over two residencies at Vasl Artists' Collective in Karachi,
Pakistan, where the 'Museum' was composed of workshops, a
newspaper, street interventions and public events. With support
from the Artangel Interaction Programme, the 'Museum' was
established in London in 2009, where it temporarily occupied a
space behind a Pakistani-run barber's shop on the Bethnal Green
Road. The Exception and the Rule was shown in this space
along with a library, a specially edited newspaper, and a running
programme of events, language classes and public seminars.

The Exception and the Rule was mostly filmed in Pakistan and
India, and its miscellaneous and modular narrative frequently
crosses the border of these countries. In the latter half of the
film this border is presented directly, as an 'Intermission' that
consists of footage from the daily India-Pakistan border ceremony,
at which guards on each side lower their national flags and perform
an 'opening' of the dividing gates. Using film, video, found
footage and photography, The Exception and the Rule throws
its own site, narrative and production into question, particularly
through use of direct (though unacknowledged) citations, its
ambiguous application of fictional elements, and through a use of
text and spoken English or Urdu. Though micro-repetitions of sounds
or words become an aggravating aural presence within the film,
there is never a point of repetition or return within its wider
framework; one cannot resume contact with a place, a person or a
scene that has been previously witnessed. Though The Exception
and the Rule begins and ends in London, this concluding site of
return is transformed by a shift in visual content and filmic
handling. In addition to a formal shift in this treatment of site,
the scenes and images gathered in South Asia now inflict upon
London and its translation into film.

GEMMA SHARPE: The Exception and the
Rule emerged through and after a number of journeys that
you've made in India and Pakistan. What initially led to you make
this film?

KAREN MIRZA: We are both very interested in
'nomadism', or the artist as a nomad who moves and travels within a
frame of work and working. So our engagement with India was first
developed over a five-year collaboration with Shai Heredia in 2002,
with whom we helped to establish the Experimenta Film Festival in
India. We also curated the Cinema of Prayoga, a film programme that
toured the UK in 2006. Through these projects my understanding of
'nomadism' started to shift my view on Modernism, in particular the
complex negotiation that arose from the recognition that I had
grown up within a predominantly Western-centric frame of Modernism.
In a sense Brad and I became avid collectors and archivists of what
this might mean, and we interrogated how this could develop our
practice. We started making work that directly problematised the
relationship of the camera to the subject of the camera, and also
the camera's agency in public space. There was a certain activism
that we were already engaged with in London, and we repeated this
sense of production and facilitation in Mumbai, drawing together
research of histories, and parallel cinemas within India as part of
the festival. Whilst we were taking part in this we started
carrying our camera with us, and thinking through the making of
work there. Taking a camera out in India one discovers a very
different relationship to the apparatus, and also to your context
and your subjectivity as a film-maker. Undoing that frame of
cultural references started to activate the process of The
Exception and the Rule.

GS: Throughout the process of making the film
and coordinating the 'Museum of Non Participation' you would have
encountered a deluge of information that you could not have
expected. How did you translate this 'deluge' into The
Exception and the Rule? Because it seems to me that what
appears to be the film's miscellany is actually its fidelity to a
varied process of making. How does the film respond to and then
reflect the sheer weight and mass of material that you have been
dealing with?

BRAD BUTLER: For me one of the main issues was
about how to deal with the complexity of what we were experiencing.
In particular in Karachi, we came to feel that we were being
saturated with politics throughout the everyday. Of course, in the
UK we also experienced this, but you can't miss direct political
questions when you're in a place like Karachi, where you encounter
these quite amorphous and abstract geopolitical forces all the
time. This led us to think about our relationship to the issues we
were experiencing, including how we could make visible our
situation in relation to our (postcolonial) conditions of
production. The idea that what we see is a condition of
how we see became a significant in both The Exception
and the Rule and 'The Museum of Non Participation'. This led
Karen and I to start working, not so much with what was inside the
camera frame, but rather with what we couldn't capture, and our
discussions became about getting a sense of the boundaries and the
limits of our inclusion and exclusion. The Exception and the
Rule and the 'Museum' present this to the viewer so that he or
she might feel like they're passing through those interrogations
within the filmic scenario - in other words, the project not only
profiles the viewer's encounter with the material, but also what
they bring to this encounter.

KM: When you generate lots of ideas and
material, you have to negotiate the problem of translation in
editing this down into a work. But to add to your question about
the generative strategies of our practice - which is a
research-based practice in which reading and theory is key - our
methods of research were really 'tested out' by setting up a number
of generative situations. The video workshops in Karachi, the
newspaper interventions, the English/Urdu classes and the seminars
in the 'Museum' all facilitated a way of working through ideas
individually and collaboratively. Collaboration is foregrounded
within The Exception and the Rule. It's carried all the
way through the process, even to the film's mythical character of
Raj Kumar, who stands in for all the collaborators that contributed
to its material and ideas. There are also 'migratory forms' here,
as a lot of the film's expressly cinematic ideas are enacted in
'The Museum of Non Participation'. You could almost see the film
being a large template within which the 'Museum' fits, and at the
same time that it's a work that itself sits inside the
'Museum'.

GS: Could you relate the film to others that
you made before it? For example, Where a Straight Line Meets a
Curve (2003) has a similar Structuralist
sensibility.

BB: The Exception and the Rule is part
of a line of thinking that goes way back to our initial meeting of
disciplines and the energy created around that. I came into the
collaboration from anthropology and Karen had an art history and
painting background. We used these differences to 'interrogate'
each other, though now I think that we would never split up our
interests in this way. We are far more conscious of the overlaps.
The first film we made together was called Non Places
(1999), where we intended that the viewer would experience
the politics of representation as opposed to facing the
problems of the politics of representation. Non Places was
a concept articulated by anthropologist Marc Augé, who argued that
a symptomatic part of the logic of late capitalism is the ever
increasing proportion of our lives spent in supermarkets, airports,
hotels and on motorways. Non Places sought to embody this
observation in a cinematic experience, where the cinema itself is
proposed as a non-place where a transitory occupant experiences the
illusion of being always and never at home. Non Places
used a number of subtitled textual loops without sound, so the
viewer had to internalise the text and give it his or her own
voice, and also potentially take in some of the violence of the
film's space - the psychological violence that we were working
with. This film also critiqued the tension and violence attached to
the cinematic portrayal of such non-places as underpasses, empty
streets, stairwells and corridors. Where a Straight Line Meets
a Curve was our first colour film and in that piece we wanted
to address our collaboration directly. The film aims to pull focus
between the physical space and a mental space, and almost halfway
through it breaks down a 'white cube' into a psychological
space.

GS: The place of a film-maker in a byway in
Mumbai is extremely contested, and you seem very conscious of that.
But what's not necessarily as contested here is the gesture of
appropriating or even 'plagiarising' other artists' work. Within
The Exception and the Rule you restage Vito Acconci's
Following Piece (1969), for example, and you drop lines of
Georges Perec's writing into the narrative. How does this bear out
in relation to other moments of borrowing?

KM: Clearly the use of appropriation,
misappropriation, and crediting and discrediting is entirely
conscious. But it leaves me with questions that we're taking
through into the next film. I still wonder now whether we should
have credited everybody - so, in a sense, Vito Acconci should be
there in the end credits as a kind of collaborator. There is a
scene with the crows in Mumbai by India Gate and the soundtrack at
that point is from The Birds, so we could have also put
Hitchcock in there as a collaborator too. But maybe it's not fully
developed because there are omissions, and I do think a lot about
those omissions now.

BB: On reflection I agree with that totally.
But I don't want to lose the critical point of your question, which
is this idea of the ethics of appropriation. In The Exception
and the Rule the appropriated voices within the film are in
dialogue with the unfolding of the film's making. We are interested
in how much of the original meaning of our appropriated texts
survive these acts of cultural translation. So ethical tensions
like this are also made explicit within the film, as we want the
viewer to destabilise his or her own relationship to the images
that unfold: to actually have to confront the very ideas of ethics
that those representations imply. There are several moments of
self-criticism in the film, which were built in from the start and
that operate both as points of rupture and as punctuation
throughout.

KM: The question of ethics is definitely there,
and thinking about appropriation there is a latent question about
voice: whose voice? who is speaking on behalf of whom? who has the
authority? These sorts of questions are posed by participatory
projects, and certainly when one uses other artists' works like
this.

GS: Within The Exception and the Rule
you indulge in specificities of knowledge. An audience in South
Asia may be less accustomed to the filmic references that you
employ as they come largely from a Euro-American canon. Similarly,
as you 'jump' over the India/Pakistan border throughout the film,
you're utilising another layer of specificity that might
disadvantage any viewers who do not recognise markers of place such
as Urdu or Hindi scripts, for example.

KM: Seeping through the film and the 'Museum'
is the idea of translation,- not only translation between languages
or cultures but also translation within language. In a sense for
me, after making The Exception and the Rule I started to
think again about the audience. The film has a dispersed audience
and interestingly enough, the most satisfying reading of the film
for me has actually been in the Arab regions. We showed the film in
Cairo and here for example, there was a reading that involved a
cultural and geographical knowledge that was outside the South
Asian context of the film, and also the European and North American
context that it relates to.

BB: Your question brings up a reading of the
film that we would hope for, and now we can really connect the film
to 'The Museum of Non Participation'. There is the issue here
around the point at which one's knowledge allows access to
particular experiences and levels of engagement. In Europe, many
viewers recognise the Acconci or Dan Graham references and in
Cairo, the interesting thing for me was that instead, viewers read
the conditions of the film's production. They recognised the
constraints of making a film somewhere like India or Pakistan.
Gemma, you're conducting this interview from Karachi on Skype, and
we are in London. Right now you are directly immersed in the
context that we were living in when making The Exception and
the Rule and you are well aware of the conditions for
production there. You handle this interview with that in mind.
People who have never been to a place like Karachi don't
necessarily understand these conditions. You are in this unique
situation right now and so were we. It is a privilege to be able to
make that journey: to be there and to experience the complexity of
what it means to live there. But taking Pakistan as an example, our
argument is that we all have a relationship with Pakistan, whether
we have been there or not. This is where we begin to think about
the terms and conditions of (non) participation.

Interview conducted between Karachi and London, March 2010.

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